GARBAGE AGENCY PAVES WAY

New developments are booming along northwest 45th Street but just one of them, the county's new garbage-burning plant, will pay for nearly all the road improvements needed to meet the rapid growth.

The burden inevitably will pass to county residents in higher garbage rates, said Timothy Hunt, executive director of the Palm Beach County Solid Waste Authority, which is building the giant plant just west of Florida's Turnpike between 45th Street and Bee Line Highway.

Hunt complained that Palm Beach County commissioners strapped the authority with an unequal share of improvements because the authority did not have the lobbying clout of private developers.

"Let's just say there's a little bit of inequity," he said. "We obviously don't have the finesse and style that some of the other developers in the county do."

But Andrew Hartel, an assistant county engineer, said the Solid Waste Authority freely agreed to the rezoning conditions imposed by the County Commission.

"They may not feel they got a fair deal, but those are the conditions they agreed to," he said. "If they didn't like the deal, they had that option (to withdraw)."

The authority, in order to receive the necessary rezoning for the plant, agreed to pay to widen 45th Street from two to four lanes between Interstate 95 and Haverhill Road, and to repave the existing two-lane section west of Haverhill.

It also agreed to build a new two-lane section of Jog Road running through the plant's property between 45th Street and Bee Line Highway. Jog Road ends at Southern Boulevard, but long-range plans call for it to run from the south county line to Donald Ross Road west of Juno Beach.

"It's a road that begins and ends nowhere," Hunt said.

Ken Adams, one of three county commissioners who sit on the Solid Waste Authority, said the Jog Road construction was required to keep large garbage- hauling trucks off neighborhood streets.

The authority, an independent public panel established by the Legislature to oversee solid waste disposal in the county, "got hit with about four times greater impact fees than any other developer in Palm Beach County," Hunt said. "I guess the Solid Waste Authority is just a nice guy."

The bill for the authority's work on 45th Street and Jog Road will be about $9 million, said Charles Maccarrone, the authority's director of finance and administration.

Five new commercial parks and two shopping plazas with a total of 3.4 million square feet have been approved along 45th Street, but only one is sharing in the 45th Street improvements, road engineers said.

Northpointe Corporate Park, located on the northwest corner of 45th Street and I-95 will pay about $650,000 to add two extra lanes to 45th Street in front of its property, making the road six lanes there, and to improve the intersection of 45th Street and Congress Avenue, county engineers said.

Other developers are paying road impact fees to West Palm Beach, but those will go to other projects, planners said.

When the garbage-burning plant is completed in December 1989 it will add about 400 extra vehicles a day to the road, said Hunt, who added that the other developments already are generating much more traffic than that each day.

Projection tables used by road planners estimate that an office building generates 11 trips a day per 1,000 square feet of floor space. Retail uses generate closer to 200 trips per day for every 1,000 square feet.

Adams noted that nearly all the trips to and from the garbage-burning plant will be heavy trucks while the other developments generate mostly automobile traffic.